At the Putney Co-Op, an Opera

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? —Allen Ginsberg "Go ahead," I say to my neighbor at the Putney Co-op who tells me he can't complain. "Let it out. It's mid-March and there's still two feet of snow on the ground. Fukushima has just melted down and the Washington Monument cracked at its pyramidion. Put down your bags and sing. How many times dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage teacher must you walk down the aisles as a randy eidolon humming your tunes for us to start? Our song begins in silence and grows to a buzz. We make it up as we go along, then watch our numbers swell— ten thousand members who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Who fly like a swarm to join us in our chambers, which are these aisles." I'm singing without knowing it, carrying the tune of main things, lamenting the prices with Bernie Sanders. My neighbor joins me for no other reason than singing along as a member of the cast we call the multitudes of lonely shoppers. I roam the aisles with the sadness of America, juggling onions, blessing the beets. It's a local stage on which the country opens like a flower that no one sees beside the road. In my hungry fatigue, I'm shopping for images, which are free on the highest shelf but costly in their absence—the only ingredient here that heals my sight of blindness. I see you, Walt Whitman, pointing your beard toward axis mundi by the avocados, reading the labels as if they were lines, weighing the tomatoes on the scale of your palms, pressing the pears with your thumbs the way you did in Huntington, Camden, and Brooklyn. And you, also, Ruth and Hayden, at the checkout counter with empty bags you claim are full of apples, almonds, and bananas. What can you say to those outside who haven't read your poems? Who find it hard to get the news from poetry but die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. It's night. The Connecticut slips by across Rt. 5. The moon is my egg and stars, my salt. I score the music of the carrots, scallions, and corn in the frost of the freezer windows. The sough of traffic on 91 washes my ears with the sound of tires on blue macadam.The doors close in an hour....